Stock Rhymes

aka: Stock Rhyme

Edit Locked

"While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes, With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes. Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees; If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep, The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep".

— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

A Stock Rhyme is a kind of rhyme / that everyone sees all the time. The reasons for this can vary: the rhyme choice may be extremely limited, as with love, alternate rhymes may be unusual words that are not very widely applicable (fire/spire, life/fife), or the rhyme may be particularly well-suited to a popular type of song like Silly Love Songs. Like with many stock tropes, a predictable rhyme can make an audience cringe, but a sufficiently awesome artist can often breathe new life into them.

Advertisement:

To qualify as a Stock Rhyme it should be used by at least several different artists without any apparent intentional reference to one another. Imperfect rhymes are okay. Some Stock Rhymes may be specific to a particular genre, such as "trigger/nigga" in gangsta rap or "Word/Lord" in Christian hymns.

A particularly heinous example occurs in Misteeq's "Scandalous" rhyming not only 'girl' with 'world' but also with 'pearls' and 'twirl'

Subverted in "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" by Led Zeppelin: "You can tell your friends all around the world / there ain't no companion like a blue-eyed" In any other song, the next word would be "girl", but since this song is actually about Robert Plant's dog, the word is "Merle."

Also subverted in "My Kind of Girl" by Collin Raye, which uses "Merle", "pearls", and "Tilt-a-Whirl" as rhymes.

Advertisement:

George Strait's "How 'bout Them Cowgirls" uses "round world"/"cowgirls", which is an internal rhyme variant.

Joe Diffie's "So Help Me Girl" also subverts this because the chorus is five lines long with an AABBC rhyme pattern, of which "And I can't help myself, so help me, girl" is the last line.

baby/maybe/lady/crazy (Buddy Holly's use is tame compared to the Eagles' "Take It Easy", the Spin Doctors' "Two Princes", the Four Seasons' "Walk Like A Man", anyone who sang "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" or "Hey, Good Lookin'", "Maybe" from Annie...)

Used among others by OFWGKTA member Tyler, the Creator (as Big Nasty) in this video.

'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen has an entire chorus made up of this rhyme (rhyming crazy/maybe, then baby/maybe)

Comedian Mike Birbiglia's "Guitar Guy At The Party", more of a bit than a song, contains this rhyme along with a couple of other awful rhymes. Apart from the few that suck, the rest of the song doesn't rhyme at all.

"Hello, Hello There" from Bells Are Ringing averts this in a bizarre way by non-rhyming "party" with "salami."

Also, on the same album (In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3), in the titular song, the chorus goes "Man your own jackhammer/man your battle stations, we'll have you dead pretty soon, and now/sincerely written from my brothers blood machine/man your battlestations, we'll have you home pretty soon". The first half has no rhyme, but the second..."Sincerely written from my brother's blood moo-shay-on, man your battle staaaaaaaaaations"

Edgar Allan Poe gave some of the earliest examples, except that he's talking about actual fire that burns you to death rather than the standard lust bit.

"Flame" by Pete Townshend. "Flame, you set me on fire/Nothing can take me any higher/I'm fueled on emotion and full of desire."

In perhaps the most distilled example of this trope, U2 manages to work both fire/desire and lips/fingertips into a single verse in "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

Augustana manages this with the song "Fire" "Fire burning me up/Desire taking me so much higher/And leading me home"

Les Claypool uses the fire/desire rhyme in the Primus song "Lacquer Head", though he compensates by rhyming "in-betweens" with "gasoline" immediately afterward.

All three see use in the rock song "Give In To Me" by Michael Jackson. "Love is a feeling/Give it when I want it/Cause I'm on fire/Quench my desire" and later it changes up to "Love is a feeling/Quench my desire/Give it when I want it/Taking me higher."

Marilyn Monroe's "I Wanna Be Loved by You". "I couldn't aspire to anything higher than to fill the desire..."

Cleverly subverted by Survivor in "Burning Heart", in which for once Captain Obviousdoes come to the rescue, causing "fire" to rhyme with its obvious-but-never-used natural counterpart "spire".

The entire catalog of Electric Six. Their first album is Fire. It is called fire because the word 'fire' is repeated and rhymed abundantly in the album.

Curtains makes fun of this in "I Miss the Music", when Aaron says, "Don't talk about love, or you'll have to say 'fits like a glove' or 'certain as push comes to shove, you'll pine for the person you're constantly thinking of'. Then he goes into stock rhymes for "life"...

An early and extreme example of this was "By the Light of the Silvery Moon", which rhymed the moon in its title not only with June and spoon, but also with croon, tune and soon.

Yoko Ono mocked Paul McCartney for rhyming "June" with "spoon"; he actually did once rhyme "spoon" with "lagoon" in "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window".

Her husband rhymed "You know that for sure" with "You got to let it go" and "You got to let it grow" in Mind Games.

Jonathan King wrote "Everyone's Gone to the Moon", which was, according to King, "a stupid song, that would actually rhyme 'moon' and 'June', but be so pretentious no one would notice" as a send up of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. He was right.

Subverted (for laughs) in a Pinky and the Brain episode, where Brain can't come up with any rhymes for June, despite obvious inspiration being all around him. He later decides to change it to "April". Made even worse when the song actually plays later in the episode: the song contains an overly-long list of "June" rhymes, and April is still the final word of the song.

Soft Machine has a song titled "Moon in June", which doesn't actually rhyme those words (they're not even in the lyrics at all).

Procol Harum used this rhyme in a somewhat different context than usual in "A Salty Dog": "Now many moons and many Junes have passed since we made land" (in which those words are synonymous with "months" and "years", respectively)

'70s soft-rockers Bread: "And Aubrey was her name / We tripped the light and danced together to the moon / But where was June?"

In one '60s strip of the British newspaper comic The Perishers, young Wellington gets all cod-philosophical on the subject while looking at the moon with his dim friend Marlon.

Wellington: Moon and June, how well they go together... but if June had been called Moptember or the moon had been called the blop, well, they just wouldn't have rhymed, would they? Marlon(shining a torch in Wellington's direction): I can see right up your nose.

Lampshaded by Elton John in "Tinderbox" from the autobiographical album The Captain & the Kid:

Was he worried we might go too far Maybe wind up rhyming moon and June

One of the most compressed examples of this is Yves La Rock's "Rise Up" ("I try to fly a while so high / direction sky")

Of course, Sky High in Daytona USA had it too. Except "fly" sounded like "fry".

Just one of many crimes against music in R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly."

The Moody Blues song "Blue World" used all three in the same line: "Fly me high, touch the sky/Leave the earth below...."

The very first verse of Lenny Kravitz's "Fly Away" rhymes all three of these words. In an arguable case of Rhyming with Itself, "dragonfly" shows up as a rhyme in the same stanza.

"High" by Hyper Go Go.

home/come, and Word/Lord; These are ridiculously common in Christian hymns.

mild/child is another staple of hymnals.

blood/good/food' as well.

Heaven/seven (as with "love", there just aren't too many English words rhyming with "heaven")

Worse is Heaven/given, extra points if they change it to Heav'n and Giv'n to make it fit in one syllable.

"It Ain't Necessarily So" from Porgy and Bess has the excuse that Heaven/seven is a reference to craps (which is featured elsewhere in the show), a game in which Lucky Seven is a major rule. The same rhyme in "Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo." from Damn Yankees can also be counted as a craps reference.

In "Inside the Fire", Disturbed manages to rhyme heaven, eleven, and "Devon", the unusual but valid name of the song's female character.

dance/chance/romance. There's a Junior Senior song which is actually titled "Dance, Chance, Romance".

Chris De Burgh's "Lady In Red": "I've never seen so many men ask you if you wanted to dance / Looking for a little romance / Given half a chance"

And in "Mr. Right Now" by the Povertyneck Hillbillies, which has one of the most cliché bridges ever: "How do you feel about a little romance / Can I buy you a drink or do you wanna dance / What do you think, are you willing to take the chance?"

And in "Shine On" by James Blunt: "Are they calling for our last dance? / I see it in your eyes / Same old moves for a new romance / I could use the same old lies"

groovy/movie Four songs in the 1960s, apparently not connected: "Do You Believe in Magic" by The Lovin' Spoonful in 1965, "Spooky" by Classics IV in 1967 (covered by Dusty Springfield in 1970), "Like an Old Time Movie" by Scott McKenzie in 1967, and "Elenore" by The Turtles in 1968. Also, "Manchester England" from Hair.

Used in "Great Day" by Madvillain in 2004. ("Groovy dude, not to prove or be rude, but/ This stuff is like what ya might put on movie food")

This rhyme actually got used in "The Way" by Ariana Grande featuring Mac Millar in 2013, well after the point where anyone would otherwise be likely to use the word "groovy" without being sarcastic (or without referencing Austin Powers or Evil Dead 2). Though even when getting into slant-rhymes, very few other things rhyme with "movie".

It's much more justified and less obvious a cliche when the song really is asking you to sing along because it's supposed to simulate the live performance atmosphere (e.g. "With a Little Help from My Friends").

Oasis in "The Importance of Being Idle," which is reminiscent of "I'm Only Sleeping."

Best Coast had the misfortune of using it in three songs, which has resulted in their flanderization into a band that cannot go one couplet without talking about how things are crazy and simultaneously lazy.

Worse, again/in (or anything ending in "in"). Found mostly in country music, where the dialect makes "again" sound like it does rhyme with "in".

Taken to extremes with Billy Dean's "Only the Wind", where he rhymes "again" with "wind".

rhyming/timing or rhyme/time

charms/[hold you in my] arms. Like several of the examples above, made worse by the fact that nobody would ever say anything like "I love all your charms" unless they were singing a song and planning to work some arms into the lyrics at some point.

Kaskade's "Steppin Out'" is a straight example (your lovely charms / when you're in my arms), along with dance/romance.

swagger/Jagger (Kesha, apl.de.ap, Cher Lloyd, And She Whispered, and many others who jumped on that fad provide examples)

Todd in the Shadows said in his review of Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger" (which, thankfully, does not contain the word "swagger") that he wishes there were such a word as "schmogerty" so that a more underappreciated rock star like John Fogerty could get his due as a stock rhyme.

Material Issue actually subverted this expectation a good 20 years before it became a fad among artists in "What Girls Want": "I want a man with lips just like Mick Jagger / Rod Stewart's hair and Keith Richards' stagger."

war/for, usually for the sake of wondering "what this fighting is for" or somesuch.

goodbye/cry/lies/eyes.

In "Shine On" by James Blunt: "And when silence meets my last goodbyes / The words I need are in your eyes"

The Killers' "Uncle Jonny": He's convinced himself right in his brain / That it helps to take away the pain". Though the same song includes a couple of somewhat less-used rhymes, namely "refrain" and "cocaine".

Tomorrow/Borrow/Sorrow (e.g. in Maroon Five's "Payphone", among many other examples.)

This one also shows up in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven": "Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow"

Season/Reason (many examples, but there's even a song titled "The Reason for the Season")

magic/tragic

Tonight/Light/Flight/Delight

You/do/blue/too

Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now": "Whatever it takes I will stay here with you [...] Whatever it takes is what I'm gonna do"

"Are Your Eyes Still Blue" by Shane McAnally:

Are your eyes still blueI still remember how they used to shine Or did that change tooAfter the day you said goodbye? You did what you had to do(Out with the old, in with the new) If I saw you, would I even know it's youAre your eyes still blue?

German: Herz (heart) / Schmerz (pain). "Herzschmerz" even became a kind of German trope for overly sentimental songs, poems and other media.

Another common rhyme in German is Liebe (love) / Triebe (urges, drives, also shoots (of plants)). The poet Arno Holz famously said early in the 20th century that the first to rhyme "Liebe" and "Triebe" was a genius, but the fiftieth to do so was a cretin. About half a century later poet and satirist Robert Gernhardt countered this by saying that the first man to rhyme "Liebe" and "Triebe" was a decent craftsman, but nothing more, but the one who does it for the fiftieth time and manages to write an original verse is a real genius.

Similarly to Spanish, rhyming two verbs with the same conjugation is a far too common trick. Additionally, verbs ending in -er (e.g. esquecer/ver/dizer, "forget"/"see"/"say") can easily rhyme with você ("you").

Jesus/luz/[R] ("Jesus"/"light"/"cross") is used extensively in Gospel music.

Spanish: canción/corazón ("song/heart"), amor/dolor ("love/pain"). quiero/muero ("I want"/"I die"), diferente/gente ("different"/"people"), contigo/amigo ("with you"/"friend"), mano/hermano ("hand"/"friend"), Also, since verbs only have so many endings, it's really simple to rhyme them; for example, a common rhyme is amar/soñar ("to love"/"to dream"). Another common "trick" is to simply use the diminutive of the word: all feminine words rhyme and all masculine words do too. It's usual to rhyme "bonito" ("pretty") whith the diminutive of any masculine word

Hebrew:

In Hebrew both ancient and modern there are two plural endings, -im and -ot. Since the final syllable (at least in modern and Sephardic Hebrew) is accented 90% of the time, and the plural endings are entire syllable rimes, in many Hebrew songs there are incredibly long stretches of rhyming lyrics, to the point that it is considered an easy way out. This applies to many prayers as well, as in the G'vurot prayer: "mekhaye metim berakhamim rabim, somekh noflim verofei kholim wumatir asurim." Among people who are more familiar with the techniques used in poetry abhor this kind of rhyming, known as homeoteleuton, or, in Hebrew, kharuz dikduki (grammatical rhyme). A half-decent way to make this acceptable would be at least to make sure that the consonant beforehand is the same (noflim—kholim is somehow acceptable, metim—rabim is not).

Since Hebrew vocabulary, like all Semitic languages, is made up from triconsonantalnote Some are bi-consonantal, and Modern Hebrew neologisms often have four, but three is standard. roots fitting into a template of vowels and affixes between and around themnote Some phonologists, most notably Outi Bat-El, challenge this notion, but its been acceptable since the first grammarians and is still generally held true today, there are many words that rhyme with each other, most notably verbs. A good Hebrew rhyme would usually rely on words from different lexical categories (e.g. verbs and adjectives) or creative near-rhymes instead.

Like Spanish, Polish has flexion, meaning that endings carry gramatical information, hence a lot of verbs in the same form will rhyme, eg. "rymuje/kreskuje". Unlike Spanish, Polish inflects nouns and adjectives, too, broadening the rhyme pool, although overusing this is considered Painful Rhyme.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy